For those of you not looking for employment, please excuse this post (but consider forwarding it to others it might apply to). I don’t use this platform very often as a way to advertise job opportunities – other than the Hubbard Fellowship, of course – but this is an exceptional situation. The Nebraska Chapter of The Nature Conservancy rarely has open positions, especially within its land management team, but right now we have two!

One of those jobs is the Preserve Manager Position in the Platte River Prairies and the other is a Land Steward who will assist the Preserve Manager at our Niobrara Valley Preserve. In addition, we will soon be posting some seasonal positions (mid-April through mid-October) that will be helping with fire operations and monitoring in the Sandhills.

The Platte River Prairies is a place familiar to anyone who has followed this blog for very long. Our current land manager, Nelson Winkel, is sliding into more of a rowcrop agriculture role with us, where he will be helping farmers adopt practices to increase soil health on their land. We are looking for someone to take his place as an innovative and energetic steward of the 3,300 acres we own along the Central Platte River, as well as a couple other tracts of land. The ideal candidate will have several years of prior land management experience and the ability to think creatively and share experiences and ideas with a wide audience. Within the next year, we plan to hire an assistant for this position, providing even more capacity to do great things.

The Platte River Prairies is a special place to me – it’s where I became a land steward in 1997, before eventually moving into more of a science and outreach role. It is located in the stretch of the Platte River that hosts more than half a million sandhill cranes each spring, along with uncountable hordes of geese, ducks, shorebirds, and other migratory birds that visit the river and the nearby Rainwater Basin wetlands during migration. However, the birding and avian conservation opportunities, at least to me, are just icing on the cake.

More importantly, the Platte River Prairies is an active site for the development and testing of prairie restoration and management strategies. We’ve restored over 1,500 acres of crop land to high-diversity prairie, and are now evaluating how well those restored acres act to functionally enlarge and reconnect the formerly isolated fragments of remnant prairie adjacent to them. We have a little more crop land to convert in the coming years, but have largely shifted our restoration attention to some of the remnant prairies. Many of those remnants are missing important wildflower species because of years of broadcast herbicide use and overgrazing prior to our ownership. The progress made so far on those sites has been very encouraging.

While we’ve been spending less time on seed harvest in recent years, we’ve spent more time devising and evaluating techniques for increasing the diversity and ecological resilience of prairies. That effort involves combinations of prescribed fire and grazing, along with the control of invasive plants. Patch-burn grazing and open gate rotational grazing are two approaches we are currently playing with, but our overall goal is to find the key principles that any rancher or land manager can apply to their own sites to optimize ecological resilience. We frequently host workshops and field days, at which we share what we’re learning with a wide variety of audiences. You can read more about what we do on the Platte River Prairies here.

The second position we’re hiring will be assisting our Preserve Manager at the Niobrara Valley Preserve in north-central Nebraska. This is one of the most staggeringly beautiful places in the world, with 56,000 acres of Sandhills prairie, ponderosa pine and oak savanna/woodland, deciduous forest, and crystal clear streams cascading into the Niobrara River. If you’re new to the blog, you can search through old posts (use key words like “niobrara, bison, etc.) to see and learn more. Regular blog readers will be very familiar with the site because I can’t help but take countless photos every time I visit.

The thousands of people per year that float down the section of the Niobrara that has been designated as a National Scenic River spend most of that time enjoying the scenery on our property as they pass slowly by. About half of the roughly 45,000 acres of prairie are grazed by two herds of bison, numbering about 500 animals each. The other half is leased to neighboring ranchers for cattle grazing, and we are working to develop grazing approaches on our land that can be applied elsewhere across the 12 million acres of the Nebraska Sandhills.

The position we’re currently hiring at the Niobrara Valley Preserve will be focused heavily on the maintenance aspects of land management, building and repairing fences, ensuring the bison and cattle have water, operating and maintaining vehicles and equipment, and fighting invasive plants. The person will also likely help with prescribed fire operations and some of our science and outreach work at the Preserve.

It takes a certain kind of person to live and work in the landscape along the Middle Niobrara River. The nearby towns are small, the grasslands are vast, and the combination of the two is bliss for some, but lonely and isolating for others. We’ll be looking for someone who is comfortable living and working hard in a very rural part of Nebraska. Our staff at the Preserve is very dedicated to conservation and our land, but also to the surrounding landscape and the communities of people living there.

The job description for the Platte River position can be found here and the Niobrara Valley Preserve position is here. Just search for ‘Nebraska’ if the link doesn’t get you directly to them.

Alternatively, you can visit nature.org/careers, click on current job opportunities, and search for Nebraska.